Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein was afraid the title of Shakespeare in Love would be too hifalutin for a mass audience. But he'd underestimated movie audiences' great love for the bard, both in traditional productions featuring Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh and Franco Zeffirelli and in modern reinterpretations, such as 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew) and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. These are just a few of intriguing tidbits in British film journalist Daniel Rosenthal's exploration of Shakespeare on Screen, which is loaded with commentary, criticism, in-depth profiles (of actors and directors like John Gielgud and Akira Kurosawa) and full-color photography. Agent, Laura Morris. ( Mar.)
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Product Description
The best of the Bard on the silver screen! Cinema's love affair with Shakespeare began almost with the start of moving pictures and has continued passionately and unabated to this day. From the most faithful adaptations (Kenneth Branagh's uncut Hamlet) to versions musical (West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate), modernized (Ian MacKellen's WWII Richard III, Baz Luhrman's hallucinogenic William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), and otherwise transformed (Forbidden Planet, a low-budget yet compelling sci-fi retelling of The Tempest), see how the greatest of plays became the finest of films. Among the brilliant artists whose work receives special homage here are Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Branagh--who did double-duty as Shakespearean actors and directors--as well as Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, and John Gielgud. With numerous stills and quotations.
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